NPR Summary

This collection of dark short stories takes place somewhere in a near future where the U.S. economy has crumbled, dirty bombs are commonplace in American cities and prion diseases are eating everyone's brains. A prisoner dumped into Cleveland's "zombie preserve" sees his bloodthirsty companions not as monsters, but as a new kind of wildlife. A teenager watches her mother slipping away into madness as disease eats her brain, but worries more about how to escape her mother's girlfriend, a hoarder who is slowly filling their home with piles of junk. A woman who sells dolls on the internet has to deal with an online reputation she never asked for, and hip-hop loving Chinese factory workers are fomenting socialist-capitalist hybrid revolutions.